Of Eliot, Elephants, and Expat Mascots

Valentine's Day is upon us. But before gushing about my beloved el-e-phant and all it means to me, I want to talk El-i-ot, as in George: another extraordinary creature with a prominent schnoz. She is coming to mean a lot to me, too.

Somehow I missed out on the works of George Eliot (the nom de plume of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans) when I was a student.

As an expat in England, I lived in fear that someone would someday expose this lacuna. I tried to make up for it by faithfully watching all the episodes of the BBC adaptations of Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss.

But I still didn't pick up the books.

Years later, I am back in the United States and, Kindle in hand, have decided there can be no more excuses, especially as Eliot's oeuvre can be downloaded for free. While I have yet to tackle Middlemarch, I'm now halfway through The Mill on the Floss.

And I've already made some significant discoveries.

For all these years, I've missed out on Maggie Tulliver — a lively and free-spirited child, as smart as a whip, said to be based on Eliot herself. As the daughter of the man who owns the mill on the River Floss, Maggie is the novel's protagonist.

I've also missed out on an exchange that could have enhanced my understanding of why people travel.

Courtesy The Dunktionary

I refer to the scene toward the start of the novel when Maggie pesters her father's head miller, Luke, to tell her whether he's read any books apart from the Bible. He confirms he hasn't, so she offers to lend him one of her picture books, called Pug's Tour of Europe:

...that would tell you all about the different sorts of people in the world, and if you didn't understand the reading, the pictures would help you; they show the looks and ways of the people, and what they do. There are the Dutchmen, very fat, and smoking, you know, and one sitting on a barrel.

When Luke owns up to having a low opinion of Dutchmen, Maggie says: "But they're our fellow-creatures, Luke; we ought to know about our fellow-creatures."

Animated Nature, by William Bingley
(available from Google Books)

Seeing that Luke has not been swayed by her appeal, Maggie wonders if he might like to take a glance at Animated Nature instead:

...that's not Dutchmen, you know, but elephants and kangaroos, and the civet-cat, and the sunfish, and a bird sitting on its tail — I forget its name. There are countries full of those creatures, instead of horses and cows, you know. Shouldn't you like to know about them, Luke?

To which Luke responds that he "can't do wi' knowin' so many things besides my work" as that's what "brings folks to the gallows."

Now, I have to hand it to Maggie. For a youth who has spent her short life in the provincial St. Ogg's, she really knows her onions. She understands the basic reasons why people might venture to other places: to see and get to know their fellow-creatures.

Plus can I hear Eliot gently mocking us by insinuating that we sometimes conflate our fellow humans with strange animals? ...

Hang on a second, a kid is tugging on my arm. Goodness, it's the insatiably curious Maggie. She says she has a question for me:

Why an elephant, ML? Why not a kangaroo or a civet-cat, which are also featured in Animated Nature?

I'm not used to interacting with fictional characters, but what the heck, makes a change from talking to myself:

Maggie, you have a point.

Like the elephant, the civet is native to Africa and Asia, two continents that remain inscrutable to many of us Westerners.

And the first Europeans who saw kangaroos did not know what to make of a creature that has a head like a deer but without the antlers, and that stands on two legs like a human but hops around like frog. They could come up with only one word for it: "astonishing."

Wait, there's another voice cutting in. No way: it's GEORGE!!! She's saying she has a question for me, too:

As you know from making it halfway through The Mill on the Floss, Maggie has a strange and twisted relationship with her doll. Could it be that you, too, have an elephant toy or figurine to which you have a preternatural attachment? Perhaps you keep it hidden in your attic ...

ML's elephant collection

Ahem, George, I haven't got an attic, but I suppose you might mean metaphorically?

I don't mind telling you that I've collected a number of elephant objects, but only since the launch of this Web log last year. I find one or two of them colorful or cute, but that hardly qualifies as an elephant fixation.

Besides, I've met people who are far more elephant besotted than I am: Véronique Martin-Place or Beth Lang, for instance.

And then there's Ona Filloy, a New Zealander who lives in a Victorian house in Brisbane. She and I have exchanged several messages about her elephant curios: a magnificent ebony-and-ivory elephant head and lamp ...

Oh, wait. George is looking impatient. She wants to ask another question:

Then why, perchance, did you settle upon the elephant as your mascot for experiencing life in other parts of the world?

Hmmm... For such a formidable intellect, I find her a bit nosy (hahaha). Still, let's see if I can impress her:

George, I thought you'd never ask!

I could give lots of reasons, but here are three you should find compelling:

1) By reviving the expression "seeing the elephant," I'm hoping to put the trials and tribulations of the modern-day traveler in perspective.

You see, today we have the luxury of traveling in vehicles that fly even faster than birds. But even though this makes life so much easier, we are constantly grumbling about it.

We forget that our counterparts in your century, who came up with the expression "seeing the elephant," had it so much worse.

I'll give you two quick examples:

1. Emigrants who set out for California. Perhaps there are some 21st-century adventurers who would prefer to dine with the Donner party than have Christmas dinner in an airport because of flight delays, but I haven't encountered them yet. The Donner party is, of course, just one among many who trekked some 2,000 miles across continent in the mid-1800s in hopes of seeing the elephant. But they are distinguished for their botched attempt at taking a "shortcut" to California, only to get trapped in the frozen wilderness of the Sierra Nevada. (No, you don't want to know what they ate!)

Print of an original painting: "Antietam,"
by Thure de Thulstrup, courtesy The Old Print Shop

2. Young men who fought in the U.S. Civil War. The expression "seeing the elephant" has a secondary meaning of seeing battle for the first time. If today's soldiers could time-travel onto the battlefield of Antietam, the scene of the most brutal hand-to-hand combat in U.S. history, don't you think they'd appreciate their unmanned aerial vehicles even more?

2) The elephant, with its massive size and theatricality, is the perfect symbol for why most of us travel.

As Maggie intimates when she offers Luke her picture books, most of us go abroad because we yearn to see great sights and to be entertained.

As the largest land animal, the elephant is symbolic of that yearning. It represents the kind of fear-laced excitement most of us will never experience unless we seek it out, which, for most of us unimaginative types, entails venturing to points unknown.

Today we no longer approve of training elephants for circuses. But the same qualities that made the elephant such a successful performer for Astley's Royal Amphitheatre in Lambeth — intelligence, personality, and a certain quirkiness — are also on display in the wild.

Audrey Delsink, who has observed many an African elephant, has a favorite story she likes to tell about a proud elephant bull. She and several others were sitting in a land rover [a kind of horseless carriage] watching as Charles (that's what they called him) tried, but failed, to push over a large tree. Charles looked up, saw them laughing at him, and walked over and pushed a smaller tree right down on top of their car! Delsink claims he then sauntered off with a toss of his head and a self-satisfied swagger.

Notably, the only other animal on Maggie's list that can hold a candle to the elephant in these respects is the ocean sunfish, which with an average adult weight of 2,200 pounds, is the world's largest known bony fish.

But as I think as you can see from watching this little movie (yes, we now have moving pictures!), its antics are less than enthralling:

3) The elephant is super trendy nowadays.

George, welcome to the era where actors, actresses, musicians, sportspeople and other popular entertainers are the new Greek gods. We call them celebrities ("celebs" for short).

Right now among the celebs, elephants are all the rage. Here are some recent examples:

1. Elephants keep turning up at celebrity nuptials. At the end of last year, a celebrity couple included an elephant with an elaborate headdress in their wedding celebration in Los Angeles (the closest thing we have to a Mt. Olympus, which isn't very close since it's terribly flat).

Said couple weren't the first — another pair tied the knot with elephants and camels a few months before them; nor will they be the last.

A celebrity super couple — think of them as our Aphrodite and Ares — are rumored to be planning a Hindu-style wedding to take place this year in Jodhpur, India. Will the groom ride in on an elephant? Ladbrokes in London is offering 10-1 odds.

Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

2. An elephant is reputed to have bonded very closely with a celebrity heart-throb. A young deity with the face and reputation of Eros says he accepted the lead role in a movie called Water for Elephants because he fell head over heels with his co-star: a 9,000-lb. elephant named Tai.

George, I know you are thinking: so what? There's no reason we mortals should feel compelled to mimic these gods and their frivolities. (This blog even has its own label for that: Dumbo Culture.)

But George, hear me out. You Victorians took for granted your ivory cutlery handles, musical instruments, billiard balls, and other items. Little did you know the toll it was taking on the elephant population. Allow me to share a chilling statistic: in 1831, ivory consumption in Great Britain amounted to the deaths of nearly 4,000 elephants.

George, the sad truth is that as a result of the fashion for ivory, the elephant population is now at risk.

But several celebs are doing their best to change that. One or two of them have recently adopted elephants in support of their conservation.

But I digress. My real reason for applauding the celebs and their predilection for the pachyderm is a matter of self-preservation: I'm hoping to get a celebrity endorsement for this blog.

On that note, and without further ado, I offer my valentine to the elephant. (Yes, George, we still celebrate Valentine's Day, despite dropping the "saint.")

So, George, what do you think of my reasoning? ... Yoo-hoo, George, ayt? ... George, please come back! Was it something I said: about the ivory, about your proboscis? I promise to get cracking on Middlemarch to atone ...

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Question: So now it's your turn! Do you think the mascot for expats, rex-pats, and repats should be:
a) an elephant
b) another creature ____________
c) a range of creatures, as in Maggie's book.
Extra credit: Name the bird in Maggie's book that "sits on its tail."

What Do Barack Obama and Isamu Noguchi Have in Common? Mothers Who Saw Elephants...

Perhaps it's not surprising given my life-long tendency to think (a little too far) outside the box, but for some time now, I've been fixated on what I see as the close resemblance between Barack Obama and world-famous sculptor and architect Isamu Noguchi. Part of it is their mixed-race, movie-star looks:

Isamu Noguchi and Barack Obama as youths (Noguchi photo by Berenice Abbott).

But the other piece of it is that both men benefited from having parents of different races and cultures. They saw the elephant early in life, which influenced their careers in a positive way.

Isamu Noguchi (whose paper lantern lampshades I have coveted ever since living in Tokyo) was able to infuse mid-century modern design with Japanese minimalism, to stunning effect.

And Barack Obama was able to infuse community organizing in Chicago with the Asian art of consensus seeking, which he'd learned during his formative years in Indonesia.

But then something funny happened. After a long period of shunning sightseeing, I decided to play tourist again. First, I took an outing with a friend to the Noguchi Museum in Queens. Second, finding myself in the role of trailing spouse in Jakarta, Indonesia, I made a little pilgrimage, as it were, to the Beseki School, which President Obama attended between the ages of 8 and 10.

From left: Noguchi sculpture in front of the Noguchi museum; inscription on statue of Obama at the Beseki School.

These two expeditions diverted my attention away from these two supremely talented men and toward their mothers: respectively, the journalist and educator Léonie Gilmour, and the anthropologist and Indonesia specialist Stanley Ann ("Ann") Dunham :

:

From left: Léonie Gilmour in 1912, courtesy Wikipedia; S. Ann Dunham's yearbook pic, courtesy HistoryLink.org.

Gilmour was born in 1873 in New York City and attended the exclusive women's college of Bryn Mawr. Dunham was born in 1942 in Wichita, Kansas, and pursued education in Hawaii.

But while they lived in different eras and parts of the country, their biographies show some extraordinary parallels.

Both women predated the era of widespread international travel, when "global" was not yet a buzz word.

But were they world travelers? For sure.

Were they globally minded? Most assuredly.

And did they see elephants? And how!

Consider, for instance, these three similarities:

1) Both women have an early life-story that reads somewhere between a Mills & Boon romance and a penny dreadful:

MONSIEUR BUTTERFLY

Our story is set in New York City in 1901. The dashing young Japanese poet Yone Noguchi has just gotten off the boat from London. He places a classified ad for an editorial assistant, and an earnest Bryn Mawr graduate by the name of Léonie Gilmour answers it. The two instantly hit it off and together resume work on his book, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl — soon to become the first English novel to be published in the U.S. by a person of Japanese ancestry.
       As their professional collaboration flourishes, they fall madly in love. Noguchi writes a declaration that Leonie is his lawful wife. But then, just as Léonie discovers she is carrying his child, the relationship flounders. She goes home to her mother in Los Angeles to give birth, while Yone returns to Japan.
       After the baby is born in November 1904, Yone puts pressure on Léonie to join him. She repeatedly refuses but finally relents, arriving in Japan in March 1907. As she disembarks the steamship in Yokohama, Yone greets her and confers on the child the Japanese name of Isamu. After this reunion, he confesses he has taken a Japanese wife and they've started a family.
       Spurning the idea of being his wife #2, Léonie breaks from Yone — the cad! — once and for all. She makes her own way around Japan and ends up in the picturesque seaside town of Chigasaki, where she has her young son supervise the construction of a house facing out on the Pacific.
       Ensconced in this rustic cottage, which she likes to call her "pine nest," Léonie produces another child, a girl named Ailes Gilmour, who will someday dance for the Martha Graham company in New York. Ailes' father, who is Japanese, is rumored to be one of Léonie's English students. Yone calls Léonie a "slut," but her lips are sealed. She carries the secret of her daughter's father's identity to the grave...

OUT OF AFRICA AND INTO BLUE HAWAII

Our story is set on the palm tree-studded campus of the University of Hawaii in 1960. A 23-year-old African man, Barack Obama Sr, is winning hearts and minds wherever he goes by dint of his charismatic personality and novelty value: most students have never seen an African before. His admirers include the 18-year-old Ann Dunham (she has shed her first name of "Stanley," which her father gave her because he wanted a boy), who is in his Russian class.
       Ann is immediately smitten: Barack reminds her of the blacks she saw in the film Black Orpheus when she was 16, the first time she'd ever seen a foreign film. Surely no man could be as warm, sensual, and exotic as he is? Barack appreciates being the object of her upward adoring gaze. Within a few months of their first meeting, she is carrying his child, a boy who will someday be America's 44th president.
       The pair get married, but the relationship falls apart soon afterwards, when Obama Sr reveals he already has a wife and children in his native Kenya. His Kenyan wife has agreed that Ann can become wife #2, but Ann wants none of that.
       Not long after divorcing her son's father, she encounters another attractive foreign scholar, this time a free-spirited Indonesian. They marry, and Ann makes her first-ever trip to a foreign country. The relationship is fruitful, and they have a daughter...

Here, by the way, are our two main male protagonists:

From left: Yone Noguchi in 1903, courtesy Wikipedia; Barack Obama Sr in 1936, courtesy Appletree.

I don't know about you, but I think they look tailor made for the part of lady killer.

2) Both women displayed a cavalier attitude about picking up stakes and moving to parts of the world they knew nothing about.

Gilmour arrived in Japan in 1907 with a young child, no husband or job, and no training in the Japanese language. What was she thinking? On the other hand, she was a Bryn Mawr grad ... and it was not long before she picked up work teaching English at a school in Yokohama. She also did some private tutoring, including for the children of the late Lafcadio Hearn and his Japanese wife, Setsu Koizumi.

When Ann Dunham boarded a plane for Jakarta, Indonesia, with her son Barack in 1967, she had never left the United States before and knew almost nothing about the place she would soon be living in. Maybe it's as well. Her new husband's house, on the outskirts of Jakarta, had no electricity. The streets were unpaved. The nation was transitioning to the rule of General Suharto, which meant rampant inflation and widespread food shortages. A bit of a culture shock after Honolulu!

Still, Dunham appears to have been unfazed. Like Gilmour, she soon got herself a job teaching English (in her case, at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta). She also volunteered at the National Museum in Jakarta, and worked for a U.S. government-subsidized institute dedicated to Indonesia-America friendship.

3) Both women aspired to be part of the wider world they had risked so much to see, not just live vicariously through their offspring.

This is not to say they weren't ambitious for their children, particularly their sons. Each woman underwent a period of separation from her son for the sake of his education, and took enormous pride in his achievements.

But both women also lived for themselves, and tried to leverage their time abroad into careers.

Gilmour worked in the writing field throughout her life, first as an editor, later as an educator and journalist. Her most successful written works were short autobiographical essays for newspapers and magazines chronicling her misfortunes with a self-deprecating wit. One of them, written for the New York Times, was a wryly humorous account of being burglarized in Japan.

When, towards the end of her life, Gilmour was faced with eking out a living in Depression-era New York City, she started up a business importing Japanese knickknacks, not unlike what many expat entrepreneurs do today. Think Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame, albeit on a much smaller scale. (As the New York Times put it in its article last year about Gilbert's New Jersey store full of curios from Southeast Asia: "Love, Travel, Sell.")

It did not take Dunham long to develop a deep affinity for Indonesia, which not for nothing has been called an anthropologist's paradise, with its 17,500 islands and more than three hundred languages. (Notably, her attachment to the country outlasted her attachment to her husband: they divorced in 1980.)

Dunham enrolled in the University of Hawaii to train as an anthropologist, doing the kind of research that foreigners are always doing on Indonesia: documenting the nation's traditional customs before they succumb to the forces of modernization. Dunham wrote a thesis about the blacksmithing industry found in Indonesian villages. She obtained her doctoral degree in 1992, just three years before her untimely death from cancer at the age of 52.

But Dunham wasn't just an academic. She also developed a professional career working on behalf of women's employment in Indonesia. Her most lasting legacy was to help build Indonesia's microfinance program, giving tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs — who are mostly women.

From left: Article by Léonie Gilmour (1921), courtesy New York Times archives; a revised version of Ann Dunham's 1992 dissertation on blacksmithing in Indonesia, published as a book in 2009.

Neither Gilmour nor Dunham wrote their memoirs. Perhaps they were too busy? (Dunham apparently started hers but produced just two pages.) Their stories, however, haven't been forgotten because of their famous sons.

Not at all surprisingly, given the colorful lives these women led, the film world has taken an interest. The feature-length film Léonie was released last year, directed by Hisako Matsui, with Emily Mortimer in the title role:


Ann Dunham: A Most Generous Spirit, a documentary depicting Dunham's life, went into production last year. I just hope the tone isn't so hagiographic that it fails to capture Dunham's elephant-seeking spirit. To get some sense of that, the biopic Little Obama, about President Obama's years in Indonesia, may be worth a look. (Dunham is played by South African actress Cara Lachelle.)


But for my money, the film to see is the one where Gilmour and Dunham appear together, icons of the kind of fearless American woman who isn't afraid to see elephants — husbands, children, social norms be damned. (And, btw, they still managed to turn out some terrific kids.) It's a film that probably won't be made, but if it ever is, look for me at the front of the ticket queue!

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Questions: What do you make of the similarities between Gilmour and Dunham? Can you think of other 20th-century women who led (or are still leading) the life of lady-errant, in the United States or elsewhere?

Paying Tribute to an Elephant-seeing Statesman of Yesteryear, William Saxbe

William Bart Saxbe died this week at his home in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, age 94. A politician and statesman for many years, his biggest claim to fame was serving as U.S. attorney general under Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal. But we can forgive him that transgression in part because he was an unlikely pick for the post (a one-term Republican senator, he had frequently criticized Nixon) — but in large part because he displayed three qualities the Seen the Elephant blog associates with a fearless leader.

1) Saxbe was an American politician to the core, but he was proud of having expanded his horizons beyond American shores. He was familiar with the "seeing the elephant" metaphor and used it for the title of his autobiography, I've Seen the Elephant, published in 2000 (with Peter D. Franklin). Saxbe narrates his life's journey from his youth in a small Ohio town, to his military career during WWII and Korea, to his career as a public servant in Ohio, Washington, and overseas (he served as ambassador to India under President Ford). Saxbe's eldest son contributed the book's introduction. He lauds his father's "sense of adventure, love of travel and receptivity to new people and ideas," adding: "He's the kind of man you don't meet every day" (my emphasis). You can say that again! When is the last time this nation has encountered a politician who feels comfortable trumpeting the alter ego of an elephant seeker? That's if they have one, of course. President Bush famously had not traveled outside the continental United States before he became president. The same is true for most congresspeople and senators. Bill Clinton spent two years at Oxford at a Rhodes scholar but played down this detail of his biography during his campaign for fear it would alienate voters. Perhaps Barack Obama has seen more of the elephant than any previous president, having lived as a youth in Indonesia; but this portion of his life continues to raked over the coals by those who are on a mission to prove he's not an American citizen, to the point where he probably wishes he'd never set foot in Jakarta.

2) Whether consciously or not, Saxbe channeled the 19th-century adventurer who went off to see an "elephant." He was said by his peers to resemble the redoubtable Will Rogers. Born in 1879 on a ranch in Oologah, Indian Territory (what is now Oklahoma), Rogers just about qualifies for membership in what I've labeled "elephant seekers of old." He traveled around the world three times, achieving acclaim as much for his ability to deliver zingers ("Our foreign policy is an open book — a checkbook") as for his trick roping. Likewise, Saxbe, while he may not have been a lasso spinner, was a tobacco-chewing cattle rancher who traveled the world as part and parcel of his career in public service. He became known for such homespun "Saxbeisms" as:

• "That's a ticket on the Titanic." [a disastrous cause]
• "There'll be blood and hair on every stump." [a good political fight]
• "He couldn't carry cold guts to a bear." [a weak advocate]

Notably, Saxbe once said that Nixon, in claiming to know nothing of the Watergate coverup, was like "the man who plays piano at a bawdy house for 20 years and says he doesn't know what's going on upstairs."

3) Saxbe brought home some especially quirky mementos from his travels, a practice this blog wholeheartedly endorses. His treasured white elephants from India included the tiger skin rugs that grace his home in Mechanicsburg (these, it should be noted, are no longer environmentally correct, if they ever were) and, more unusually, a supply of betel nut, which he'd grown fond of mixing with his chewing tobacco. (Although Saxbe was a nonagenarian, tobacco chewing, it should likewise be noted, is not a habit to be recommended: bad for health and teeth.)

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Questions: Do you agree that William Saxbe merits the label "fearless leader"? Can you think of any other 20th-century statesmen who might qualify for this status?

Who Are You, What Have You Sacrificed? The Repatriation Challenge/Cornerstone #3

"The Semi-Invisible Traveler,"
by Bruno Catalano (Camden Arts Centre, UK)

Congratulations! You have almost completed the series of cornerstone posts on the themes of this blog. But in order to reach the finish line, you must undergo the experience — full of promise but mostly full of peril — of coming home again after seeing an "elephant."

In the previous post, we became acquainted with Eddie Expat, who has seen an elephant or two in his time — and lived to tell the tale. But for the final phase of this discussion, we will turn our attention to Ramona Repat, who unlike Eddie has packed in the elephant-seeking adventure and trundled back to the land of her birth.

You might think that knowing something of Eddie's story would help you to anticipate what Ramona will have to say for herself. But think again. Just as the expatriate's life is another country (or two), the repatriate's life is another country (or three).

SEE ALSO:
#1: Time to Define "Seeing the Elephant" … Encyclopedic version
#1a: Time to Define "Seeing the Elephant" ... Reader's Digest, Twitter, Movie Trailer, and Crib Notes versions
#2: How to Recognize at a Glance Someone Who Has Seen an "Elephant" ... Meet Eddie Expat

#3: Who Are You, What Have You Sacrificed? The Repatriation Challenge

Ramona Repat is back in the United States after a decade-and-a-half in other countries. I invited her to be a guest blogger, but she prefers to have me speak on her behalf as she has family matters to attend to, which she neglected during her time abroad. Ramona says it has taken her some years to come to grips with the challenges of repatriation — also known as "reverse culture shock" or "reentry syndrome." What follows is a summary of her key observations.

MEET RAMONA REPAT

Ramona's Top Ten Observations on Repatriation:

"The Prodigal Son,"
by Gerard van Honthorst (1623)

1) At first Ramona objected to the title of this post, saying it was too repat-centric, since the first thing every returnee must realize is that it's not just about them any more. After all, this blog does not cover prisoners of war or refugees that are being sent home. On the contrary, the blog's focus is on the kind of repats who have voluntarily spent their lives seeing elephants and whose stories are therefore closer to that of a prodigal son (or daughter). Even if their homecoming is joyous, they may still face a reckoning not unlike the one in Rudyard Kipling's poem:

My father glooms and advises me,
My brother sulks and despises me,
And Mother catechises me
Till I want to go out and swear.

In Ramona's view, repats would do well to rise above their personal histories in acknowledging all those who have, in essence, underwritten their elephant-seeking adventures:

• Your family couldn't always depend on you for support at critical moments, as you were too far away to be physically present (being present in spirit isn't always enough).
• The government had to sacrifice some portion of your income (as you didn't pay much in taxes).
• Politicians couldn't rely on your support for their campaigns (at most, you probably voted by absentee ballot, and only in the presidential election years).
• The working world had to carry on without the benefit of your input and experience.
• The environment, too, suffered: all that galavanting around the world has left an untidy carbon footprint.

2) Ramona further advises patience: just as you couldn't see an elephant overnight, it will also take time to earn back your compatriots' trust. She warns in particular against assuming you can easily sell yourself with an elephant-seeker's résumé. Most potential employers could not care less about how many wrinkles the elephant has. She read somewhere that if you move abroad, you lose four years of your career, as you can't take your networks with you and have to start again with zero contacts. Well, job hunting as a repat is not for the feint of heart either. So, Ramona suggests getting a dog, if you don't have one already. (If ever there was a time to benefit from a canine's unconditional love, this would be it...)

Statue of Rip Van Winkle, Irvington, NY

3) Who are you, what have you sacrificed? Ramona admits, however, that a certain amount of navel gazing is inevitable for repats like herself. It's not uncommon, she notes, for them to develop a Rip Van Winkle complex. Rip Van Winkle got himself into trouble by proclaiming himself a loyal subject of King George III, having snoozed through the American Revolution. Likewise, most repats possess some major cultural lacunae. Ramona remembers thinking, for instance: since when did this fad for home schooling take off, and what's this I keep hearing about charter schools? And, though most repats don't come back with long white beards (they are more likely to sport a perennial tan), they must nevertheless come to terms with the loss of their former lives (and youths) in the mists of time. And for 21st-century American repats, there is an additional counter culture shock in realizing that your nation — and in many cases, your family as well — has become highly dysfunctional in your absence. Ramona often reflects on how far times have changed since Thomas Wolfe wrote his book suggesting that if you went home, you might be seen as a failure in the eyes of your family and friends. Now it's the other way around. You might be tempted to judge them harshly: good grief, what have you done to this place?!

4) But if Rip Van Winkle is a convenient role model for many repats, Ramona recommends taking a look at the Chinese version of the tale, which in some ways rings truer to their circumstances than Washington Irving's. Irving based his story on an old German folk tale of a goatherd named Peter Klaus, who awakens from a 20-year slumber after drinking fairy wine on the Kyffhäuser Mountain, to find his village dramatically changed. (This tale has parallels to the old Jewish story about Honi M'agel.) But in the Taoist tale that was told in ancient China, a woodcutter ventures into a forest and encounters two old men playing go (weiqi). He falls into a trance and when he comes out many years later, his axe handle has rotted to dust. Japanese (who also have their own Rip Van Winkle, Urashima Tarō) found the Chinese story fascinating, as evidenced by this 9th-century poem conveying the woodcutter's thoughts upon returning to his village:

I've come back home.
There is no friend to play go with.
That place far away
where an axe handle turned to dust -
how dear to me it has become!

Ramona, too, can relate to the woodcutter's feeling of longing. Seeing elephants is an all-absorbing adventure beyond compare. Is it any wonder that so many repats become permanent malcontents? Ramona has to keep reminding herself not to come across as a Ra-MOAN-a.

5) On a related note, Ramona says that one of the most difficult adjustments for repats is a feeling that their horizons are shrinking. Ramona recalls, when she first came back to this country, being drawn to a book on display in a chain bookstore: Seeing the Elephant: Understanding Globalization from Trunk to Tail. The book concerns global financial strategy, but its title really spoke to Ramona. She recalls saying to herself: "Okay, so you've seen everything from trunk to tail. But how do you go back to seeing just trunk again — or being around others who do?" (Not surprisingly, the book was on the half-price table.)

6) As a result, most repats end up with an elephant (or two, or three) in the room. They refrain from speaking out on issues they feel passionately about for fear of being labeled raving lunatics. Ramona, for instance, still can't get over how many cars there are on the roads compared to when she left, of which an unacceptably high proportion are SUVs. In her day, only the military and the police were allowed to drive such gas-guzzling vehicles. How she would love to get up on her soapbox and preach about her years of living in countries where people get around perfectly well using public transport and driving fuel-efficient cars. But she knows full well that, by the time she has cleared her throat, most of her listeners will have bolted for their Range Rovers.

7) That's of course assuming that Ramona could deliver an effective oratory given how challenging she sometimes finds communications with her fellow citizens. Clueless? Well, yeah. "You go, girl," "smokin' hot," "wife beater," "fugly," "rad," "yo," "yadda yadda yadda," "whatever," "as if" — Ramona is in a perpetual state of incomprehension. Vocabulary aside, she still struggles with daily interactions. When someone tells her to "have a nice day," for instance, there is a visceral sense of familiarity coupled with a sense of strangeness. After wrestling with her conflicting emotions, Ramona has at long last reached a place where she accepts that she is now a hybrid personality and will never be fully re-assimilated. She and several of her repat friends now think that the only country where they will feel at home is the one they create for themselves in cyberspace, so have set up blogs. (Ramona calls hers "Ramona's Much-Expanded World" in honor of Ramona Quimby, that rambunctious 8-year-old heroine. Ramona projects she will leave Portland eventually.)

Isabella Bird, 19th-c. explorer
(print by Stephen Alcorn, 1991)

8) As a repat, Ramona also finds herself much more sensitive when someone shows intolerance or bigotry, than she was before her travels. She recalls an incident that occurred the first summer after she came home, when she was walking down the street in the blazing heat carrying a sun umbrella she had picked up in Japan. Suddenly, a car went by honking its horn and with someone leaning out of the window yelling that people "don't do that in America." Ramona noticed it was an SUV with Virginia plates. At times like these, Ramona wishes she had been born in Victorian England, where people who traveled and saw elephants were held in high esteem, however eccentric they became (and women carrying parasols was de rigueur).

9) But despite the many trials and tribulations, Ramona urges new arrivals to have faith in the repatriation process. Cultivating your own back garden can be immensely entertaining after so many years on foreign soil. When she first got home, Ramona spent hours roaming the aisles of her local drugstore, supermarket, and bookstore, feeling like a kid in a candy store. And who knew that the U.S. had so many superb vacation spots on its borders? "Mexico and Canada, here we come!" she is fond of exclaiming.

10) A fan of cinema, Ramona is also not one to shy away from the grand gesture, and she thinks the grandest gesture of all for an elephant seeker is to come back home. So what if you have to eat humble pie and spend some years carving out a new niche for yourself in your homeland? "Hang it all, you've seen an elephant!" The words of the farmer whose cart got knocked over by the circus parade are a mantra that has sustained Ramona through her readjusting pains. Not to mention the idea that if all else fails, she can go abroad again and work on a sequel ... (Joke! Ramona insists she is here to stay, even if it necessitates frequent visits to the pachyderm house in the local zoo.)

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Question for repats: Can you relate to Ramona's story? Has she left anything out?
Question for expats: Can you imagine coming home again after hearing what Ramona has to say, or has she scared you off completely? (Pls note: That was not her intention!)

How to Recognize at a Glance Someone Who Has Seen an "Elephant"/Cornerstone #2

Welcome back to the extended tour — the second in a three (and a half)-part series on what this blog is about, known as "cornerstone posts."

If you need to stretch your legs, you're in luck. We've just now rounded the corner where the tourmobile stops for long enough for us to get out and gawk at people who have seen an "elephant."

But before we do that, some orientation: who exactly are these people, what are they like, and how do they differ from the rest of the traveling herd?

SEE ALSO:
#1: Time to Define "Seeing the Elephant" … Encyclopedic version
#1a: Time to Define "Seeing the Elephant" ... Reader's Digest, Twitter, Movie Trailer, and Crib Notes versions
#3: Who Are You, What Have You Sacrificed? The Repatriation Challenge ... Meet Ramona Repat

#2: How to Recognize at a Glance Someone Who Has Seen an "Elephant"

Once you've seen an elephant, it's relatively easy to spot someone else who has. The faraway look in their eyes, the I-can't-quite-place-where-it's-from (because it's such a funny hybrid) accent, the rather droll way of responding to life's vicissitudes — all are dead giveaways. But what if you haven't met an elephant seeker before, how will you know?

For background, I've prepared a one-page hand-out on Eddie Expat. Though he can't be here today with us in the flesh — he lives on the other side of the world — Eddie is a good friend of mine and trusts me to represent his story. Rest assured, Eddie is with this tour in spirit. The more you come to know him, the more adept you'll be at recognizing people who have seen an elephant.

MEET EDDIE EXPAT 

Top Ten "Need to Know" Items About Eddie:

1) Eddie is the kind of traveler who stays put in his destination — he is not, repeat not, a tourist (he does not travel merely for pleasure) nor is he a globetrotter. He's not one to "eat, pray, love" around the world in response to a life crisis at home. And never once did he aspire to be the kind who clocks up more than a hundred countries and six continents by age 25. Unlike most globetrotters, Eddie prefers to take it slow and easy. He unpacks his suitcase (never a backpack) and stays awhile, sometimes for many years or a lifetime. Eddie insists that s-l-o-w travel is what people generally mean by seeing an "elephant." Elephants are highly intelligent, complex animals. It doesn't do well to rush the experience.

2) At the same time — and I don't think he will be insulted if I say this — Eddie is no country expert. By that I mean, someone who has seen so much of the elephant they don't even know they're looking at it any more: they are the elephant. Eddie has seen the elephant, wrinkles and all, but he prides himself on staying at arm's length. Now why is this, you might ask, given Eddie's pachyderm obsession? Eddie doesn't know exactly. It stymies him, too. Sometimes he says it's because he doesn't want to spend his adulthood focusing exclusively on one pursuit, especially as he has to earn a living. Other times he says that not knowing the elephant too well will make it easier to say good-bye one day. Eddie intends to come home, he's just not sure when ...

3) Eddie moved abroad during his formative years. He eventually married and now has a couple of kids, but he still talks about seeing the elephant in the first person, because for him it's been a deeply personal connection. He likes to think that his elephant-seeking experience has turned him into a philosopher — albeit of the garden variety. (Eddie by the way won't mind that joke at his expense. He's a generally humorous guy with a self-deprecating wit.)

4) Eddie can certainly be philosophical about the places where he's lived. The other day I emailed him a map I'd found of London — that's where Eddie went to live first, for graduate school. It was a map plotting where and by whom photos uploaded to Flickr and Picasa were taken during a given period. Sights captured by "local" shutterbugs — who are identified as such because they've taken many shots over a wide range of dates — are marked with blue dots. Tourists get red dots. (Yellows could not be placed in either camp.)

Locals and Tourists #1 (GTWA #2): London, by Eric Fischer

Eddie wrote back that he found the map, which had been generated by a computer programmer in California, very interesting. Whereas tourists see one London and locals see another, he sees both versions, and for him, that's seeing an elephant. You want the broadest possible canvas if the goal is to glimpse life's rich tapestry.

5) Eddie does not delude himself into thinking his travels have been epic, but he does think they are worthy of writing about. That's why he keeps a blog, occasionally including snippets of poetry and wisdom that have inspired him along the way. He notices other expat bloggers doing this, too, and for fun keeps a running list of taglines that he finds uplifting. Here are a few of his recent favorites:

• "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." — Saint Augustine, The World Is a Book blog
• "Where everything is something trembling ... on the brink of something else." — Vladimir Nabokov, On the Brink of Something Else blog
• "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." — Talmud, Destination Anywhere blog 

Pony Express ad, 1860

6) Returning to the elephant, which for so long has been the object of Eddie's quest: now, it's true to say that Eddie has developed a certain elephant envy over the years. He particularly admires the way these extraordinary animals have evolved for long-distance living. Elephants in the wild range tens of miles a day. They live in large, tight-knit family groups and communicate with each other at great distance. Eddie doesn't think that expat groups are particularly tightly knit, since the members are so transient. He also doesn't think that modern communications — Blogger, Facebook, Twitter — are especially helpful for staying in touch. Sometimes he wonders if they are any better than the Pony Express, which used to sustain the pioneers who traveled to the Wild West to see the elephant. While Eddie maintains a Facebook page and tweets occasionally, deep down he agrees with the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar that virtual community is no substitute for the real thing and most social media contacts are "weak ties."

7) Eddie is further aware that some part of him couldn't give a toss about having hundreds of friends with whom he communicates constantly. If pressed to say why he's such a loner at heart, he points out that it helps him notice subtleties — and that subtleties are what makes seeing the elephant worth the trouble. Eddie also admits that while he dreams of returning home, he doesn't particularly miss his home country. He was always something of a misfit in America, never having been  one of those "bright outgoing happy shiny" people. (I told him the American psychologist Barbara Held, author of Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching, could have a field day with that comment.)

8) As much as he admires the elephant, Eddie doesn't mind admitting that the quest has left him a trifle world weary. "Same s**t, different scenery really is true": Eddie occasionally catches fellow expats saying things like that, and although he disapproves, he knows it's not dissimilar to the Victorian saying: "Been there, done that, seen the elephant." In his lowest moments, Eddie wonders whether, by giving himself over to the ambition of seeing an elephant, he peaked out too early. He fears he may even be suffering from what the Hawaiian Islanders call "rock fever" — except that for him, the rock is Planet Earth. In which case, what's the cure: space walking?

Emily Dickinson Museum poster (2008),
created by Penelope Dullaghan

9) As he gets older, Eddie admits to having the odd doubt about his chosen life course: was it actually necessary to leave home to see an "elephant"? At his wife's encouragement, Eddie has begun reading Emily Dickinson for the first time. He likes Emily's poems, especially the one about the robin, but he's even more bowled over by her biography — the fact that she could find everything she needed for her poetry in the flowers, birds, and insects she encountered in her own back garden. In comparison to the reclusive 19th-century poet, he and his fellow expat adventurers seem a rather unimaginative lot. On the one hand, you have a garden-inspired world-class poet; on the other, a group of garden-variety world-weary philosophers. Not much of a choice, is it?

10) Knowing Eddie as well as I do, I'm sure he would want this lecture to end on an upbeat note. Like many an intrepid traveler, Eddie is a firm believer in: If life hands you lemons, make lemonade. It's an attitude that has helped him remain grounded over his years of living overseas. Hardly surprising, then, that Eddie has become a lemonade maker worth his salt, occasionally mixing in tequila. (Hahaha — just checking whether you're still listening ...) Eddie recently sent me a link to a Web site for expats where it said that one of the things no expat likes to admit is how much they drink in a given week, particularly as it never seems excessive at the time. I responded I'd drink to that, and he told me he was guffawing out loud. I told you he was a jolly sort!

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Question: Any questions you'd like me to answer on Eddie Expat's behalf? We have a few minutes before setting off for our final destination on this tour: what I've labeled the repatriation challenge. At that time, we will learn all about Eddie's counterpart, Ramona Repat. Can't wait!

Time to Define "Seeing the Elephant"/Cornerstone #1

I've developed a new test for friendship. A true friend is someone who gives you brutally honest feedback upon receiving a link to your blog. One friend that I contacted this week passed with flying colors. She wrote back: What is the "theme" of the blog, sort of "adventures of expats and former expats"?

My friend's uncertainty was a wake-up call. I realized it's was time to deliver what's known in the biz as a cornerstone post, addressing the blog's major themes. Check out the rest of the series:

#1a: Time to Define "Seeing the Elephant" ... Reader's Digest, Twitter, Movie Trailer, and Crib Notes versions
#2: How to Recognize at a Glance Someone Who Has Seen an "Elephant" ... Meet Eddie Expat
#3: Who Are You, What Have You Sacrificed? The Repatriation Challenge ... Meet Ramona Repat

SEE ALSO: Three-part series exploring the etymology of the "Seen the Elephant" expression: 50 Ways to See an Elephant, Parts I, II, and III.

#1: Time to Define "Seeing the Elephant"

So, back to my friend's Q: is this a blog for expat stories? The answer is, no, not exactly, especially if we're using "expat" in a very limited sense to mean a person who is sent to a country through his or her place of work. The term "expat" implies that you have a career job (versus just picking up whatever work you can get) and that you intend to go back to your home country.

For me, these are rather tedious distinctions and not what this blog is about.

I'm aware of a certain irony in this position given that I've been an expat in my day — and on the strength of that affiliation, have joined several expat blogging groups. It's just that I'm wary of overusing a word that tends to conjure up a negative picture of the sort of people who:

• Go into a siege mentality, "circle the wagons" and say: "Right, it's just us now." I'm sure you know the kind of expats I mean, the ones who live in a colony or compound, or socialize as if they do.
• Enjoy slagging off the former homeland: e.g., "Is that what they call a train service?"
• Become obsessed with the negatives of their new home country: e.g., "Don't like the police here, and can't get any decent ham."
• Can no longer spell English words.
• Are inclined to excessive alcohol consumption.

Now, I like to see pink elephants as much as the next expat, but again, that's not what this blog is about. (By pink elephants, by the way, I don't mean Sarah Palin's posse of women; poor choice of idiom on her part!)

Rather, this blog is interested in recording (mostly) sober observations about what makes people uproot themselves from their native lands. Candidates for seeing the elephant can range from people on lavish expat packages to those who join the military and travel to distant lands. Notably, soldiers in the U.S. Civil War would use the expression "seeing the elephant" to describe the experience of seeing combat for the first time.

I am not, however, interested in the pedestrian observation that despite our vastly different backgrounds, we elephant seekers share a yearning for a better job, change of scene, adventure, blah, blah, blah. I want to dig down and ask: what made you, unlike most of the other people you grew up with, a candidate for detaching yourself from your native identity to try your luck in a far-off place?

In my interviews with elephant seekers, each one has told me a different story. Beth Lang, for instance, said that it was an overwhelming love of the French language, dating all the way back to high school, that propels her need to travel every year to France and French-speaking Africa. She finances this peripatetic life by teaching French to college students and consulting for French-speaking African embassies, in between trips.

For Kym Hamer, by contrast, language was hardly an incentive to pack up and leave her home in Melbourne, Australia, for a new life in London. She can speak the Queen's English just fine — if you can forgive a few pronunciation quirks not to mention her rather country-bumpkinish habit of fossicking on people's desks. What drew Kym to the UK was not language but the history everywhere she looked as well as, rather surprisingly, the weather. She loves snow! (Fortunately, the London climate has been more than obliging these past few winters.)

As for David Hufford, both he and I were among the many foreigners who flocked to Tokyo at the height of Japan's bubble economy in hopes of working for Japanese companies. During the 19th century, it was common for Americans who were heading West to find gold to say they were "seeing the elephant." You might say that David and I were modern equivalents of 19th-century gold rushers. And, like our earlier counterparts, for the most part we failed to strike it rich. We quickly discovered that much greater profits for far less labor were to be found in other activities such as teaching English or becoming a foreign tarento.

A few more points to note:

1) Quality, not quantity. There are no set rules about the journey's length; what counts is how you approach it. That said, for most of us, it will require a prolonged stay in the adopted country (or countries), of which a significant minority will opt to become "lifers" in that place.

2) Broader horizons. Though the journey need not be to another country — it could also be to another coast, or to a big city — it entails broadening one's horizons in a literal sense, through travel. Recall the story of the farmer who tried to go and see the elephant only to get knocked unconscious by the circus parade, led by the elephant. That was extremely unfortunate, but the farmer still deserves credit for making the effort to journey by wagon as far as the town hosting the circus, a feat in and of itself.

3) A serious elephant fetish, metaphorically speaking. You don't have to be like the farmer and go in search of pachyderms, though that might not be a bad idea. Elephants are known for their terrible tempers — to anyone who has been following the news, the name Baby Louie should speak volumes — but on the whole I would contend they are lovely animals: intelligent, complex, and in need of our protection. (Perhaps Baby Louie attacked his trainer because he was bored?) But you do have to go in hopes of broadening your horizons to include sights as exotic as an elephant, and be willing to run the risk of disappointment (what I like to call, "wrinkles and all"). A case in point is that of Emperor Charlemagne, who, as explained in a previous post, became obsessed with obtaining an elephant. We can imagine he was less than thrilled when, upon its arrival from Baghdad, the creature pulled down the stone stable that had been specially built for its home. (I wonder if Abul Abbas was an ancestor of Baby Louie?) More often than not, however, the experience of "seeing the elephant" fosters tolerance, and even affection, for the culture you are immersed in.  Two quick stories from my own travels should help to illustrate how this works:

1. I went to Japan and didn't see an elephant but saw a whale ... on a plate ... being served as a main course! To this day, I don't approve of eating whale. (I'd like to think it's because I refused to compromise my core values — only I suspect it's as much because I didn't care for the flavor.) Nevertheless, I've been known to defend this Japanese culinary preference, pointing out that eating whale is not all that different from eating other mammals. I call this a Blind Man's Tale — referring, of course, to that old chestnut from India, about the blind men and the elephant.
2. I went to Japan and didn't see an elephant but met Hello Kitty. As explained in one of my very first posts, I have developed an inordinate fondness for the famed Sanrio cat and have accorded her the status of a Treasured White Elephant in my life.

Well, I've wittered on for long enough, and besides it's almost 5:00 p.m., time for making a G&T, a bad habit I picked up during my misspent years with other expats. Let me wrap this up with two concluding thoughts:

1) It remains a sad reality that the vast majority of the world's uprooted cross international borders because of civil wars, violence or persecution (even greater numbers of people are internally displaced by such forces). We who have seen the elephant should never forget how privileged we are to travel by choice.

2) Once you've seen an elephant or two, it no longer matters where you physically live: it becomes a state of mind that you carry around, a kind of elephant in the room. For some, this may be a burden — I'm thinking of soldiers who have traveled to the front and seen action and now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Whereas for others, it can be a source of enlightenment. I'm remembering my conversation with Beth Lang again. She sailed through the Monica Lewinsky scandal convinced it was no big deal as compared to the peccadilloes of France's political leaders. For still others, seeing the elephant can be a source of endless delight. David Hufford may seem an unlikely candidate for this since he no longer views Japan through rose-colored glasses. Yet he admits it can never be summer again for him unless he can partake in the sublime Japanese meal of unagi (grilled eel) and cold beer. For some things, the grass really is greener, and on a beastly hot summer's day, it doesn't get any greener than that.

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Questions: Will the real elephant seekers please stand up? Have I told you enough to identify who they are through this post? And have I been too hard on the expats among us — do you feel betrayed? If so, I don't know what I was thinking, I may have been drinking?! And now it only remains to say thanks to Amelia for inspiring this post — and to everyone else, cheers!

SEE ALSO:
#1a: Time to Define "Seeing the Elephant" (Reader's Digest, Twitter, Movie Trailer, and Crib Notes versions)
#2: How to Recognize at a Glance Someone Who Has Seen an "Elephant"
#3: Who Are You, What Have You Sacrificed? The Repatriation Challenge